May 29, 2014

Three attacks on my book A Troublesome Inheritance have appeared on The Huffington Post's blog this month. For readers puzzled by the stridency and personal animus of these compositions, I'd like to explain what is going on.

The issue is how best to sustain the fight against racism in light of new information from the human genome that bears on race.

My belief is that opposition to racism should be based on principle, not on science. If I oppose racism and discrimination as a matter of principle, I don't care what the science may say because I'll never change my position. As it happens, however, the genome gives no support to racism, although it does clearly show that race has a biological basis, just as common sense might suggest.

Many social scientists, on the other hand, have long based their opposition to racism on the assertion that there is no biological basis to race. I doubt they personally believe this and suspect that they oppose racism on principle, just as I do. But they believe that other people, less enlightened and intelligent than they, will not abandon racism unless told that everyone is identical beneath the skin.

So whenever someone points out that race is obviously biological, defenders of the social science position respond with attacks of whatever vehemence is necessary to get the inconvenient truth-teller to shut up.

For many years this tactic has been surprisingly effective. It takes only a few vigilantes to cow the whole campus. Academic researchers won't touch the subject of human race for fear that their careers will be ruined. Only the most courageous will publicly declare that race has a biological basis. I witnessed the effects of this intimidation during the 10 years I was writing about the human genome for The New York Times. The understanding of recent human evolution has been seriously impeded, in my view, because if you can't study the genetics of race (a subject of no special interest in itself), you cannot explore the independent evolutionary histories of Africans, East Asians and Europeans.

The attacks on my book come from authors who espouse the social science position that there is no biological basis to race. It is because they are defending an ideological position with a counterfactual scientific basis that their language is so excessive. If you don't have the facts, pound the table. My three Huffington Post critics -- Jennifer Raff, Agustín Fuentes and Jonathan Marks -- are heavy on unsupported condemnations of the book, and less generous with specific evidence.

Despite their confident assertions that I have misrepresented the science, which I've been writing about for years in a major newspaper, none of these authors has any standing in statistical genetics, the relevant discipline. Raff is a postdoctoral student in genetics and anthropology. Fuentes and Marks are both anthropologists who, to judge by their webpages, do little primary research.

Most of their recent publications are reviews or essays, many of them about race. Their academic reputations, not exactly outsize to begin with, might shrink substantially if their view that race had no biological basis were to be widely repudiated. Both therefore have a strong personal interest (though neither thought it worth declaring to the reader) in attempting to trash my book.

It would try the reader's patience to offer a point-by-point rebuttal of the three reviews, so I will address just the principal arguments raised by each. Let's start with Raff, who asserts, "Wade claims that the latest genomic findings actually support dividing humans into discrete races." In fact, I say the exact opposite, that races are not and cannot be discrete or they would be different species, but it's easier to attack an invented statement.

By denying the existence of race, social scientists are intimidating biologists from pursuing this path. This is particularly exasperating given the fallacious nature of the belief that race must be denied if racism is to be quelled. The geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky observed, "People need not be identical twins to be equal before God, before the law, and in their rights to equality of opportunity." Unlike identical twins, we are not all clones. We exist as different races by virtue of our evolutionary histories. The recovery of this history is a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry, and from this advance of knowledge unimagined benefits may accrue.

79 comments:

""""""""""""""""""Many social scientists, on the other hand, have long based their opposition to racism on the assertion that there is no biological basis to race. I doubt they personally believe this and suspect that they oppose racism on principle, just as I do. But they believe that other people, less enlightened and intelligent than they, will not abandon racism unless told that everyone is identical beneath the skin. So whenever someone points out that race is obviously biological, defenders of the social science position respond with attacks of whatever vehemence is necessary to get the inconvenient truth-teller to shut up. """""""""""""""""""

I don't quite understand why these people haven't had it dawn on them that with each passing month and year their arguments (and they) will look more ignorant, and one can hardly un-write what one has written.

I thought Wade was remarkably understanding in this piece, though not entirely gentle. I imagine that comes from having heard from and thought about this opposition a good deal more than I have over the last decade. I would have been rougher, but less informative.

It's not a big secret that Jennifer Raff, Augustin Fuentes and Jon Marks are all far-left Cultural Marxists. If these lightweights weren't given megaphones by MSM, they would simply be ignored by anyonee with an IQ above room temp.

The Raff review and subsequent discussion are very good. As one commentator noted, though, her main argument -- that human variation is clinal, not racial -- is perfectly compatible with the kinds of claims Wade makes in the second half of the book, and in general compatible with cognitive ability and behavior differences between different groups being partly genetic in origin. To what extent human variation is continuous rather than discrete is an interesting question, but the really controversial HBD claims don't depend on answering it one way or the other.

The academic reaction to the ideas in Wade's book reminds me of the academic reaction to anyone who raises any questions about global warming/climate change. It's shrill, heavily vituperative, and denunciatory. Rather than feel that I'm listening to an objective scientist, I feel I'm listening to someone defending an ideological position. In this case, environmentalism takes the place of anti-racism.

To raise any questions about climate change means you hate the environment and want to destroy it. You're not allowed to ponder whether the situation is as severe or unmanageable as the environmentalists want us to believe; you must embrace the theory with all your heart or else the Koch brothers win. The NY Times appeared to be in pain when it had to concede that the temperature has held stable for 16-17 years now. To the Times that obviously was not good news.

I thought Wade was remarkably understanding in this piece, though not entirely gentle. I imagine that comes from having heard from and thought about this opposition a good deal more than I have over the last decade. I would have been rougher, but less informative.

He set the right tone, all these people are defending an intellectually weak position, but one that endures because 99.9 percent of the intellectuals in the West are scared to death of even getting within ten feet of attacking it. They feel they can go after him because he is only a journalist, but the intellectual standards of biological anthropology have fallen so much that even someone with a doctorate isn't really anymore knowledgeable than a good science reporter like Wade, because Wade is carrying so much less pseudo-intellectual baggage.

Wade's wholly unconvincing argument is that each race has evolved different but equally admirable abilities and talents. For instance, one race evolved the ability to jump high into the air. Another race evolved the ability to design a spaceship that can explore the outer limits of the solar system and beyond.

I don't know why you and Chuck wasted so much time on that Colin fellow. I wouldn't have. But that's probably his goal (and what he was trained to do as a lawyer) -- to wear people down by the sheer mass of his senseless sophistry.

Maybe most people just aren't wired to get it, and there's no sense in trying to explain it to them. I've come to suspect that's just the way things are, and that's why people need religion to convince them to think and behave in an adaptive manner.

Study the Bible and it's clear that it's largely an exercise in applied eugenics justified by a higher power.

I suspect that Wade is pulling his own chicanery here to avoid career damage, in asserting that shutting down racism is the most important thing. But if blowing smoke out of his a** over this allows him to speak the truth on other verboten things, then I suppose its a good start.

It's not a big secret that Jennifer Raff, Augustin Fuentes and Jon Marks are all far-left Cultural Marxists.

They are all anthropologists. But it seems it's the same thing. Heck, those departments are probably the last best holdouts of the Red Diaper True Believers. Somehow (well, a very deliberate somehow) the field of anthropology went off the rails. It wasn't really about dead people, was it?

Have you just crawled out from under a rock for the last 20 years? Are you that dense that you don't think if he doesn't couch his writing in talk like that he won't be marched at bayonet point to grovel at the feet of St.MLK the Blessed?

I can't stand all these brave race warriors who want everyone else to sacrifice their career while they post bravely on the internet.

One of Wade's problems is that leftism isn't about equal opportunity anymore. He's taking the 1960s liberal position that we should all be equal under the law. But that's not the point anymore--it's to eliminate disparate impact and make everyone have equal outcomes.

OT: The general idea of the Chinese unofficially colonizing Africa. This book + review isn't anything special, I post it for the idea: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/howard-w-french/chinas-second-continent

I just think it's a fascinating story - the Chinese are right at home in corruption and state-of-nature politics, they're going to pwn Africa in a decade or two. Imagine, the smarts and hardnosed-ness of China with the lebensraum and resources of Africa. I expect it'll be the most unexpected and interesting story of the next decade.

I don't know why you and Chuck wasted so much time on that Colin fellow. I wouldn't have. But that's probably his goal (and what he was trained to do as a lawyer) -- to wear people down by the sheer mass of his senseless sophistry.

If that was a prizefight it would have been stopped about the point Colin mentioned the Atlantic Ocean. That was like watching Wepner v Liston.

Wade: "I don't care what the science may say because I'll never change my position."

How is this not an apt characterization of Wade's detractors? Who's ignoring new evidence? Who's proudly basing their arguments on a moral assertion treated as an article of faith?MY GOD, ARE PEOPLE EVEN TRYING ANY MORE?!

"The won't, can't cut the hard sciences...Yep, sociologists and cultural anthropologists...you're going to get the ax. "

I wouldn't be too confident about that. The decisions will be made on political grounds. I'd back the sociologists to have a better chance of surviving any cuts. Sociologists and cultural anthropologists are better adapted to living in a world of political correctness. In this case natural selection will favour them.

Founded by one Ariana Huffington, nee Ariana Stassinopolous, one time presudent of the Oxford Union. Perhaps her biggest laim to fame was landing a gig on BBC TV's iconic 'Tonight' review show way back in the 1970s. She gained a great deal of notoriety for her shameless pushiness and the inpenenetrability of her accent, which caused her to be regarded as a national joke by 'Tonight's' core middle class audience. This sparked off a classic remark by the playwright Alan Bennett "She's so boring that you fall asleep halfway through her name".

There are a number of reviews other than these three that Wade hasn't addressed. Many of those (which Steve has linked to) make specific and substantive criticisms of the book that do not trash the main point about race having a biological basis (which should be pretty incontrovertible.)

The speculative part of the book, where races are indicated to be proxies for cognitive and behavioral qualities, is the main point of controversy. If that is established to be factual (and Wade has not proven it to be so), it would provide a basis for racial discrimination that no principle will be strong enough to withstand (not even Wade's.) That is why more care needs to be taken before presenting unproven theories to a lay audience.

Perhaps her biggest laim to fame was landing a gig on BBC TV's iconic 'Tonight' review show way back in the 1970s. She gained a great deal of notoriety for her shameless pushiness and the inpenenetrability of her accent, which caused her to be regarded as a national joke by 'Tonight's' core middle class audience.This sparked off a classic remark by the playwright Alan Bennett "She's so boring that you fall asleep halfway through her name".

You are correct. She got that job on ability and not gender. Can anyone else spot when the BBC started to decline?

Precisely. Programs to create equal opportunities have not resulted in equal outcomes. Wade's critics fear that the unequal outcomes they now attribute to racism & white privilege will be attributed to biological differences and they will be forced to drop their accusations of discrimination.

The question needs to be put to the race deniers if they would accept life saving cancer treatment if they found out it only works on white people (or black or East Asian). Or whether they would advise others diagnosed with race specific diseases to simply ignore the diagnosis because race obviously does not exist.

As medicine moves more and more into the targeted genetic realm, these questions become more and more obvious. And the questions should be asked today. Is Cystic Fibrosis a social construct? How about Tay-Sachs? Tropical Splinomegally Syndrome is imaginary? Parkinson's is just old crackers shaking with all their pent up racism?

And with "multi-racial" becoming a matter of pride often celebrated, are these really just multi-delusional people? I'm confused!

The speculative part of the book, where races are indicated to be proxies for cognitive and behavioral qualities, is the main point of controversy. If that is established to be factual (and Wade has not proven it to be so), it would provide a basis for racial discrimination that no principle will be strong enough to withstand (not even Wade's.)

The market has already digested the fact of mean differences between races, and market participants apply it whenever and wherever they are allowed.

As one commenter points out, Wade's fundamental principle seems to be that governments should treat all those that they govern equally. (or as another bunch of guys once put it, "... We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, [in] that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness[originally "property"]. - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ... ").

Unfortunately, among those very persons who claim that race does not exist - and also among people of Wade's current ideological persuasion - are a large proportion of those who have worked tirelessly to ensure that contemporary governments divide their citizens into classes based on race and to ensure that these same governments treat citizens in these different, racially-based classes very, very unequally in matters such as access to education, jobs, government funding and other resources; criminal and civil legal proceedings; and civil rights, including freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom to participate freely in their own governance.

Wade himself is afraid to fully come to grip with the facts, proven even beyond the usual standards of accepted scientific knowledge, that large and profound group differences exist between the largest racial categories, e.g., those often denoted caucasian, sub-saharan african, asian, australian, melanesian-polynesian, and american indian; that these include significant group differences in psychological traits such as intelligence, personality structure, and the strength of basic biological drives; and that as a result there are profound group differences among these races in how well, overall, their members adapt to and participate in modern polities, economies, and societies.

Only a few brave souls have as yet chosen to address these latter issues and their implications. I don't think that the most appropriate term for such persons is "racist", although they are inevitably branded as such. They themselves often prefer the term "race-realist" and this is probably a more reasonable term.

Only these people have even come within spitting distance of the most profound question: How can we reconcile the foundational principles of the Declaration of Independence with the realities of racial group differences in a multi-racial polity.

Most persons on the public stage including Wade and essentially all of his critics have studiously avoided engaging this particular question. I can't blame them. If it were even known that I had openly framed the issue in this way I would probably lose my current position. Even Galileo recanted when sufficient pressure was applied.

They are all anthropologists... Somehow (well, a very deliberate somehow) the field of anthropology went off the rails. It wasn't really about dead people, was it?

Anthropologists are just Literature professors who spend time in huts. The rest of the time they are weaving narratives from a ball of wool labeled "my political beliefs." Any connection to reality that results is purely accidental and probably undesired.

Wade: "I don't care what the science may say because I'll never change my position."

"How is this not an apt characterization of Wade's detractors?"

I see where he's coming from. Suppose Bob has an IQ of 150 and John has 100. Scientifically, Bob is a lot smarter. But on political PRINCIPLE, I can still believe and support equal rights for both.

I was assuming he was talking about Wade's book, not Wade's post re-asserting his belief in equality before the law. So what's he suggesting? Our own set of Nuremburg laws to account for HBD? If so, this is yet another reason we're doomed--wild-eyed youngsters will fulfill the left's prophecies. This guy, then, doesn't realize just whose side he's on.I've always naively assumed the goal was turning back the stupidity of disparate impact and all the corruption and degradation that comes with it; allowing the truth to be known and the law to be applied equally, letting the chips fall where they may. As if that was a plausible alternative. What I schmuck I am.

"Perhaps her biggest claim to fame was landing a gig on BBC TV's iconic 'Tonight' review show way back in the 1970s."

And perhaps that came about because of her relationship with Bernard Levin, at the time probably the most famous UK newspaper columnist (who, as is the way with famous newspaper columnists, is now almost totally forgotten).

"The won't, can't cut the hard sciences...Yep, sociologists and cultural anthropologists...you're going to get the ax. "_______________________I wouldn't be too confident about that. The decisions will be made on political grounds. I'd back the sociologists to have a better chance of surviving any cuts. Sociologists and cultural anthropologists are better adapted to living in a world of political correctness. In this case natural selection will favour them._______________________________

Well, the demands of the tech world and ironically, the demands of the eco-freaks demand advances in science.

Very importantly, the demands of an aging population as well as an unhealthy (diabetes, for example) young and middle-aged population demand medical break-throughs.

"Precisely. Programs to create equal opportunities have not resulted in equal outcomes. Wade's critics fear that the unequal outcomes they now attribute to racism & white privilege will be attributed to biological differences and they will be forced to drop their accusations of discrimination."5/30/14, 3:49 AM

We could base affirmative action on IQ but the outcome would still be the same.

Wade's critics, and race-deniers in general, are guilty of embracing the moralistic fallacy; i.e., that what ought to be corresponds with what is. Satoshi Kanazawa spends much time in his books disabusing the reader of both the moralistic and naturalistic fallacies.

I wouldn't be too confident about that. The decisions will be made on political grounds. I'd back the sociologists to have a better chance of surviving any cuts. Sociologists and cultural anthropologists are better adapted to living in a world of political correctness. In this case natural selection will favour them.

The problem for soc, anthro, and psych is their declining relevance for students. College is more and more a trade school. Their survival depends on sweeping deeper into the dregs to expand their market share. But the dregs do not find employment with a dumbed-down degree in soc/psych/anthro. Hence the colleges are shucking marginal programs like these in favor of more hands-on programs tied more to objective reality than politico-religious proselytizing. No 100 IQ kid takes on huge debt if his ability to pay it off depends upon getting freelance gigs writing PC book reviews like Mr. Marks & Friends.

I don't know why the likes of Raff, Fuentes, and Marks have any particular claim to object to Wade's book on scientific grounds. Anthropology is no longer a scientific discipline, if indeed it ever was one. Anthropologists themselves officially went on record that they consider science to be icky:

Realistically, there are a few different options. One is governing according to the lowest common denominator, an example of which is the TSA. We can't discriminate against the group most likely to be terrorists, so we hassle everyone.

Three approaches taken together might have some promise:

1) Heavily subsidize decent paying, private sector jobs for the left half of the bell curve. If Danes can make $21 per hour working at McDonalds, we should move in that direction. This is the sugar to go with the medicine that follows.

2) Establish a voluntary eugenic policy: give poor people generous cash incentives to have 1 child or no children. Note that the fewer poor kids we have, the more generous we can be in caring for each of them.

3) Stop net 3rd and 4th world immigration.

4) Scrap affirmative action and disparate impact. 1) is the key to making this politically palatable for NAMs; taken together, they will be better off with 1) & 4). After all, the ones who suffer from incompetent firemen or physicians are likely to be those in NAM neighborhoods.

1) Heavily subsidize decent paying, private sector jobs for the left half of the bell curve. If Danes can make $21 per hour working at McDonalds, we should move in that direction. This is the sugar to go with the medicine that follows.

We already do this. The person working a minimum wage job qualifies for so many freebies that he would have to make $60k to afford all of that himself.

Wade's critics, and race-deniers in general, are guilty of embracing the moralistic fallacy; i.e., that what ought to be corresponds with what is.

I can't agree that it's a "moralistic fallacy" when there's no moral basis for wishing that the world were different from how it actually is. Morality has to do with human behavior. How does morality apply to the actions of God?

If you want political support for nixing AA, etc., you've got to sweeten the pot. And make people feel wealthier / more dignified by getting them higher wages & private sector bennies rather than making them more directly dependent on government.

Part of the equation may be tightening the labor market via restricting immigration & cracking down on overtime abuse. Part of it may be enacting a balanced trade policy to get more manufacturing jobs domestically. Part of it may simply be paying corporations to hire people at higher wages.

"Is anthropology a science? Don’t ask the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which recently voted to strike the word “science” from its long-term mission statement. ...

...voted to change its long term goal statement from: “The purposes of the Association shall be to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects” to: “The purposes of the Association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects.”

Three other mentions of science were removed from the three-paragraph statement, while teaching and promoting public understanding were emphasized.

..changes have drawn the condemnation of data-collecting anthropologists...

"1) Heavily subsidize decent paying, private sector jobs for the left half of the bell curve. If Danes can make $21 per hour working at McDonalds, we should move in that direction. This is the sugar to go with the medicine that follows.

We already do this. The person working a minimum wage job qualifies for so many freebies that he would have to make $60k to afford all of that himself."

Oh for crap's sake. It isn't what someone qualifies for that counts, it's what they can use that they qualify for. And of that bit, it's what they can use that they actually jump through hoops to get that counts.

Every chart I've seen that diagrams public sector freebies based on income fails to take into account what is actually used at median or mode.

Whereas with a paycheck, after the mandatory deductions, you have it all whether you use it or not.

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